by Paul Doiron
“Drink this,” said Stanley Snow.
I blinked and tried to speak, but my tongue wouldn’t obey. I cradled my useless right arm against my chest.
“Drink it!”
It was my own half-empty fifth of Jack Daniel’s. He must have found the whiskey in the cupboard. A fishy scent came wafting off his clothes, the stench of rotten bait.
I pulled the words up out of my larynx. “The cops know it’s you, Snow.”
The sound of his own name being uttered caused the Westergaards’ caretaker to catch his breath. Slowly, he took a seat in the chair across from me, but his posture remained as tight as a coiled spring. He set the whiskey bottle on the table between us. “Bullshit.”
“I called Menario.” My voice sounded as if I had gargled with drain opener.
“No, you didn’t.”
“I called him on the pay phone at Smitty’s. I told him you owned the Glory B.”
Every muscle in his body became utterly still. “What else did you tell him?”
I understood that Stanley Snow was going to kill me, but I was too weak and in too much pain to defend myself. All I could do was try to gather my strength and wits.
“She knew you,” I croaked. “Ashley Kim.”
He leered at me with a gargoyle’s smile. “She thought she did.”
“She met you with the Westergaards last summer.”
“That slant-eyed slut.” He leaned forward and waved the crowbar in my face. I followed the motion warily, as if it were a swaying cobra that might suddenly strike. “She came up here to get fucked. She got fucked all right.”
My head and hand were beating to different drummers, but my thoughts were beginning to flow freely again. Hans Westergaard had told his caretaker to get the house ready. Had he mentioned—master to servant—that he was bringing his mistress? Snow had been lying in wait for Ashley to arrive.
“But why Westergaard?” I asked.
“He shouldn’t have cheated on Jill. He had no right to do that.”
“You killed Ashley for her?”
He snickered but didn’t answer my question. He just scratched his nose absently.
I needed to keep talking, keep stalling. “The police know it’s you, Snow.”
The crowbar stopped waving. “There’s nothing they can pin on me. It’s pretty easy to set up alibis. Just drop in on some diners and gas stations. Make sure people see you. Collect receipts. If you turn on the TV loud in your apartment, people will swear you were there all day.”
In my mind I saw his white pickup truck with the snowplow parked outside the Square Deal Diner. I saw his face sneering at me from the other end of the counter the morning after Ashley Kim disappeared. Even then, he’d already been readying his alibis.
“They’ll connect the dots.”
“Cops are dumb,” he said. “Including you.” He was trying to project self-assuredness, but I detected a hint of desperation behind the bluff.
“I know you killed the Driskos. They saw you at the crash scene with Ashley. They demanded money to keep quiet.”
Some of the confidence drained out of those quick-moving eyes. “What else?”
“You murdered Nikki Donnatelli.”
“Strike one,” he said with a one-sided grin. “Jefferts killed that girl. A jury said so.”
“You used to be friends.”
“That’s what Erland thought.”
So why hadn’t Jefferts named Snow as an alternate suspect? He’d named every other degenerate in Seal Cove. “You pinned the murder on him.”
His eyes became merry. “There’s proof I didn’t.”
“What kind of proof?”
He reached inside his peacoat and removed something from his inner pocket. It was a cell phone. “I’ve got a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card.”
I was baffled. How would a cell phone enable him to avoid prison? “Is that Jefferts’s?”
“No, this one is mine, but you’re getting warmer. That’s strike two, by the way.” He dropped the phone and raised the crowbar, clutching it with both hands, imitating a batting stance. “You know what happens with strike three, right?” He swung the club. It whistled through the air above my head.
“You’re going to beat me to death?”
“I’m considering my options.”
“You’re out of options, Snow.”
“That’s what you think.” He said this with such calmness that I was completely unprepared when he came vaulting across the table at me.
Snow was quick and agile for such a gangly man. He tossed aside the crowbar and grabbed the whiskey bottle and knelt hard against my chest, pinning me to the sofa. With his free hand, he pinched my nose and began pouring scalding whiskey down my throat. I clamped my teeth shut, so the liquor spilled down my shirt, but he held my nostrils firmly, waiting for me to gasp for breath. When I did, he emptied the bottle down my gullet.
After he’d finished, he backed off, leaving me hacking. My insides burned like I’d swallowed acid. I could feel the whiskey trying to come back up.
“This is a pretty shitty little house,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “I guess they don’t pay game wardens crap. No wonder you’re so depressed.”
I coughed and spit, trying to vomit up the alcohol. My eyes had become gushers again, so he appeared blurred to me once more. I became aware of Snow stooping to retrieve his crowbar from the floor.
“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for that pretty girl of yours to come home?’ he asked.
I tried to sputter out something but couldn’t.
“I’ve been having trouble getting your gun safe open.” He gestured with his crowbar to the bedroom. “You mind telling me the combination?”
“Fuck you.”
“Figured you’d say that.”
He smacked my right arm again with the steel bar. I managed to move the wrist at the last second so that the blow caught me on the muscle of my forearm. Pain traveled up the median nerve and into my spinal column.
Snow peered at me from beneath his Frankenstein brow. “Yeah, I know all about you. Your old man shot himself, right? And Ruth Libby said you blew the head off some Indian. And now Calvin Barter’s boy is gonna be a vegetable because of you.” He began rocking back and forth on his boot heels. “No wonder you’re such a basket case, Bowditch. When I saw you at the Harpoon, I said, ‘That guy’s gonna blow his brains out some night.’” He let out a fake yawn. “What’s the combination to the safe?”
His plan was to make my death look like suicide. It would seem that I’d swallowed my gun out of guilt for Ashley Kim, Hans Westergaard, Travis Barter, and every other reason I had to feel depressed. And the state police might even believe it, too. Would Charley and Kathy, though? What about Sarah? In my heart of hearts I feared that everyone I knew would accept the evidence that I had committed suicide, just like my cowardly father had.
“Two suicides in two days, Westergaard and me,” I said. “No one will believe it.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
The whiskey came surging into my bloodstream. “I’m not going to tell you the combination.”
He plopped down suddenly in the chair. The legs squeaked across the floor. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should wait for Sarah to come home.”
He reached into his coat sleeve and, like a vaudeville magician performing a trick, drew out a wad of cloth. It was a pair of Sarah’s underpants. He dangled it between us and then pressed the cotton against his nose and inhaled loudly.
I snarled at him and tried to rise, but he pushed me back with the curved end of the crowbar.
The alcohol was beginning to zap the nerve connections in my brain. Sarah was due home any minute. The thought of this monster raping the woman I loved in front of my eyes was the most horrific thing I could imagine.
Dear God, I prayed. Please don’t let him hurt her. He can kill me and it will be all right, but please don’t let him hurt Sarah. I won’t fight him if you just make him go away afterw
ard. I’ll trade my life for hers, God. I’ll do whatever you want me to do, but please, God, don’t let him hurt her.
“So what’s it going to be?” Snow asked.
My eyelids were getting heavy. There was no escape. All I could do was save Sarah. Let him shoot me with my Walther and maybe he’d go away before she came home.
Except the Walther wasn’t in the safe. My off-duty weapon was still in my coat pocket.
“The combination is forty-three fifty-five,” I mumbled.
“You’d better not be fucking with me.”
I closed my eyes and shook my drowsy head to indicate that I was being truthful.
Snow flicked my nose with his finger. “Don’t pass out on me yet.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, as if I were slipping into unconsciousness. I heard him give a hyena laugh and then I heard the stomping of his boots as he left the room. It wouldn’t take long for him to realize the combination was bogus.
The whiskey had numbed much of the pain in my body, but the booze had left me uncoordinated. It took all my strength to sit up on the couch. I leaned my weight on my good arm and tried to get my feet under me, but it was as if my legs had turned to spaghetti. I crashed forward onto the pine floorboards. I tried to crawl toward my coat, which was hanging beside the door.
Snow sprang from the bedroom and stepped hard on my spine. “Where do you think you’re going?”
I could barely breathe with his weight crushing me. “It’s twenty-one fifty-four,” I gasped.
“What?” He removed his boot but held it ready to crack my spine.
I flopped onto my back. “The combination is my call number.” This was the truth; I didn’t figure I could lie to him twice.
Snow cocked his head suddenly and a smile oozed across his lips.
I didn’t understand why he was smiling.
Then I heard the puttering of a car engine. Blue-white headlights pierced the front windows as Sarah’s Subaru turned into the dooryard. I could feel my swollen heart pumping hard against my sternum.
Snow stepped out of the light. I rolled my head toward him and saw his sick, goblin leer.
“Just like Ashley and the professor,” he said.
The car door slammed as Sarah got out.
It took everything in me to shout her name.
Snow kicked me hard in the head. “That was stupid.”
He yanked open the door and went leaping down the front steps like some long-legged hunting dog. I felt myself on the verge of blacking out again, but fear kept me awake. I got up on one knee and then collapsed forward against the hanging coats, bringing down a pile of wool and Gore-Tex on top of me.
I heard Sarah shriek out in the yard. But I didn’t allow myself to be distracted.
Focus, focus, focus.
I found the pistol in the pocket of my jacket with my left hand and pulled back the hammer with my thumb.
Snow had left the door hanging ajar. Mist drifted into the house on the breeze. When I crawled onto the front stoop, I saw him stretched on top of Sarah in the mud, pummeling her. She kept screaming my name over and over.
Carefully, I raised my left arm. I watched the barrel of the pistol weave back and forth. I steadied it with my shattered hand.
“Snow,” I mumbled.
He didn’t hear me above Sarah’s screams.
“Snow!”
As he twisted his body and rose up on his knees to face me, I shot him through the chest.
39
The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the hospital. My throat was scraped raw from the tube the doctors had used to pump my stomach, and there was a ringing in my ears, like a phone from a distant room, that just wouldn’t stop. I tried to rise on the pillow but felt instantly dizzy, as if I’d been spun around in a circle half a dozen times. I bent my elbow slightly and discovered a fat IV needle taped to the big vein that ran along my left forearm.
Most people who suffer from a concussion experience amnesia—they can’t remember the incident that caused the head trauma.
I remembered everything.
With my blurred vision and the splint on my hand, it took me a few moments to push the call button. The woman who answered wore blue-green scrubs; she had wiry black hair and dark, tired-looking eyes. It took me a while to recognize her as the ER nurse I’d met the night of the ice storm.
“Where’s Sarah?” I rasped.
The woman touched my hand and nodded. “She’s resting comfortably.”
The little blond doctor appeared around the edge of the ICU curtain. Dr. Tennis Shoes wasn’t smiling this time. He leaned close to the nurse.
“How’s he doing?” he asked, as if I weren’t awake and looking right at him.
“He just asked about his girlfriend.”
His whisper was loud enough for me to hear. “Did you tell him she lost the baby?”
The nurse grabbed him forcibly by the biceps and shoved him away from my bed. “Doctor,” she said sharply, “I need a word with you, please.”
* * *
Later, before the drugs shoved me back into unconsciousness, I found myself remembering the night my mother announced she was divorcing my father.
During their nine-year marriage, my mom miscarried twice.
I learned about the first time long after the fact. It was just one of those things when the uterus rejects the fetus.
The second miscarriage was different. I was nine years old, and one warm spring evening, my dad told me I was going to have a little brother or sister. He announced the news at the dinner table while pounding down the last can of a six-pack. My mom was washing dishes at the sink, and I remember her turning around with a look of utter horror, which confused and frightened me. They must have had some tacit agreement not to tell me about the pregnancy.
My mother hurled the bowl in her hands at my father’s head, but he ducked, and it shattered against the fake-wood wall of the trailer. Usually, when my mom did something like that, she would scream and rage at him, sometimes even claw his face. This time, she just walked out of the kitchen while my father laughed softly to himself. He seemed to be enjoying a cruel joke.
A few days later, my mom took me to stay with the Coles, who lived down the road. They were a nice retired couple who sometimes baby-sat me when my mom attended one of her Dale Carnegie courses in Farmington or visited my aunt in Portland. She didn’t trust my dad to watch me for any length of time, because sometimes he would just stay out all night, drinking at his favorite roadhouse, the one where the waitresses became strippers after dark.
On this occasion, she was gone for three days. While she was away, I began thinking what it would be like to have a little brother or sister. I decided it wasn’t a prospect I welcomed. The whole pregnancy thing baffled me. I knew where babies came from—my father had shared the facts of life with me, using Playboy magazine as an instructional guide. It was more that I’d been oblivious to my mother’s condition. I’d noticed she had been gaining weight, because she never gained weight; to this day, she could still wear clothes she had worn in high school. But I was just a kid, so what the hell did I know?
When my mom came home from wherever she’d gone, she looked ashen and thinner, and she hugged me so hard, I could barely breathe. In the car, riding back to our mobile home from the Coles’, she told me that she’d had an accident and was no longer pregnant.
“What happened?” I asked as the wind rushed in around my ears.
“I fell,” she said.
“What happened to the baby?”
“He’s in heaven.”
She must have stopped at the house to break the news to my father before she came to fetch me, because when we got there, the door was ajar and his truck was gone. He didn’t return for three weeks, and when he finally did, my mom announced they were getting a divorce and that the two of us were moving to the big city, which was how she always referred to Portland.
My mother was a strict Roman Catholic. She attended Mass every Sunday and s
till said the Rosary. It didn’t occur to me until much, much later what she’d done.
* * *
When I woke again in the hospital, Sarah was sitting in a chair at the foot of my bed. She was wearing Levi’s and a black turtleneck. Her lower lip was swollen, and I late discovered that she had purple-and-black bruises across her abdomen. Her hair appeared greasy for the first time I could recall, and the shadow behind her eyes was visible for any fool to see. She leaned forward and called my name, summoning me from sleep.
“Stanley Snow is dead,” she said.
My voice was still barely a croak. “Good.”
“I thought he was going to kill you. I thought he was going to kill us both.”
“Me, too.”
She came around to the side of the bed and touched my hand. “The doctor said you have a concussion but that you’re going to be OK.”
“What about you?”
“Just some cuts and bruises.” She said this while looking at my IV bottle.
I had a hard time getting the next words out. “Why didn’t you tell me about the baby?”
My question startled her. Her eyes widened and she leaned back slightly, and I could see her trying to decipher how I could have discovered her secret. After a moment, she breathed out again. Ultimately, it didn’t matter how I knew.
“I was going to tell you, but you weren’t ready and—I think it was because I was afraid.”
She waited for me to answer, not knowing if I would respond with anger or with tears.
“You didn’t need to be afraid,” I said.
She didn’t speak, just squeezed my hand harder.
40
Two days later, the gentle yet hulking prison guard named Thomas escorted me into the Maine State Prison’s visiting area. I had received special permission to see a prisoner on such short notice. Once again, I had an appointment with Erland Jefferts.